[2604.09229] The Fast Lane Hypothesis: Von Economo Neurons Implement a Biological Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff

Computer Science > Neural and Evolutionary Computing arXiv:2604.09229 (cs) [Submitted on 10 Apr 2026] Title:The Fast Lane Hypothesis: Von Economo Neurons Implement a Biological Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff Authors:Esila Keskin View a PDF of the paper titled The Fast Lane Hypothesis: Von Economo Neurons Implement a Biological Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff, by Esila Keskin View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Von Economo neurons (VENs) are large bipolar projection neurons found exclusively in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and frontal insula of species with complex social cognition, including humans, great apes, and cetaceans. Their selective depletion in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and altered development in autism implicate them in rapid social decision-making, yet no computational model of VEN function has previously existed. We introduce the Fast Lane Hypothesis: VENs implement a biological speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) by providing a sparse, fast projection pathway that enables rapid social decisions at the cost of deliberate processing accuracy. We model VENs as fast leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons with membrane time constant 5 ms and sparse dendritic fan-in of eight afferents, compared to 20 ms and eighty afferents for standard pyramidal neurons, within a spiking cortical circuit of 2,000 neurons trained on a social discrimination task. Networks are evaluated under three clinically motivated conditions across 10 independent random seeds: typical (2% VENs), autism-...